This application pertains to the art of monitoring environmental, accident and health factors within a work environment and more particularly reporting and pinpointing hazards in the work environment to allow for prompt, corrective actions.
The invention is particularly applicable to monitoring the health and environmental factors in chemical processing and manufacturing plants and will be described with particular reference thereto although it will be appreciated that the invention has broader applications such as the monitoring of the environment for health, accident and other defects in a variety of industrial, institutional and other situations.
Prior monitoring systems are commonly of a design to monitor recognized or suspected health and environmental problems. The simpler systems are cumulative recording devices such as a pen recorder for recording the amount of a hazardous particulate in the air, or a log book for manually listing potentially hazardous events on a periodic or event-keyed basis.
Annual physical examinations are commonplace. However, the results of the examinations are normally only correlated with currently suspected problems. The recognition of a previously unrecognized correlation between a medical diagnosis and a recognized problem produces an awkward dilemma. Previous physical examinations may include highly probative information but the task of re-evaluating and analyzing numerous medical records is an arduous time comsuming task. Further, annual or special physical examinations are keyed to the recognition of present and potential health hazards from medical diagnosis.
Corporations with a plurality of plants often have employees in several plants working in the same or related environment, contacting one or more of the same hazardous substances. Further, these employees frequently change jobs and change the substances with which they are working. In the past the health hazards from these hazardous substances were frequently monitored on a piecemeal basis because of the difficulty of correlating the health of past and present employees at a plurality of physical facilities.
Further, various government agencies such as the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) and others require that health records be maintained on employees who have had contact with various toxic substances and that various reports and tabulations of these health studies be reported to the government. Other agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency require other reports on the use of other hazardous substances. As new substances are recognized to be toxic or potentially hazardous these reporting requirements are changed. These changes cause many of the prior health reporting systems to be totally revamped in order to monitor different employees, to perform different medical examinations, and report different statistics to the government.
Further, prior health monitoring was primarily responsive to health or environmental problems. These systems are lacking in the ability to recognize correlations between problems an substances in the work environments. Generally, a severe problem occurs before the causes are determined an corrective measures unertaken.